Human Rights and Global Justice Working Group

Spring 2012 Third Annual Film Series

Global Justice
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Memories of Violence and Resistance

This year’s film series is a sequel to the Human Rights and Global Justice Working Group’s two successful previous festivals in 2010 and 2011. The film series offers a variety of cinematic representations of these varying responses to human rights violations and injustice, and each screening will be followed by a discussion period.

Our hope is that the film series will initiate a campus-wide debate within the Mason community about the challenges of global justice not only in far-away places such as El Salvador and Burma, but at home as well.

The key objective of the film series is to promote discussion among Mason students and faculty about diverse ways people and movements around the world respond to atrocity and injustice around the world. The film series showcases cutting-edge feature films as well as documentary films (see list along with screening dates and times below) that explore a wide variety of issues, from the courageous Burmese political prisoners telling their life stories under an oppressive military regime to the impact of drug trafficking on poor rural Mexican communities.

Each screening will be followed by a Q&A session led by an associate faculty member. Additionally, some events will feature filmmakers and/or invited guest speakers sharing their experiences and introducing their work.

The film series is the result of a collaboration among Mason faculty members across a variety of disciplines who have collaborated since 2007 in the Human Rights & Global Justice Working Group (formerly the Transitional and Transnational Working Group at the Center for Global Studies) to study and research different mechanisms of coping with past mass violence and injustice.